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John Henry James Strehlow (born 1946) is an Australian stage director, playwright, and biographer. He is best known for The Tale of Frieda Keysser, a two-volume biography about his grandparents, [1] [2] Carl and Frieda Strehlow, who served as Lutheran missionaries at the Hermannsburg Mission in the Northern Territory, Australia.
Born in Adelaide, South Australia, Strehlow graduated from the University of Adelaide in 1969. In the 1970s, while running a clothing business in Alice Springs, Northern Territory, he started teaching drama in Darwin schools and, by 1974, writing plays for children. He published the first volume of The Tale of Frieda Keysser in 2011 and the second volume in 2019.
Since 1978, Strehlow has lived in London, [3] and produced and directed William Shakespeare’s plays and modern British classics. By 2012, he had directed and toured over 50 professional productions (including four of the plays he has written) to widely in the United Kingdom and elsewhere in Europe, as well as to festivals in Italy.
Strehlow was born in Adelaide, South Australia, the second son of TGH Strehlow and his first wife Bertha née James. [4] His family has lived with and studied Aboriginal people for three generations. He was educated at Adelaide Boys High School from 1958–1963.[ citation needed ] While at school, he studied the piano and the clarinet, later switching to the organ, winning the Organ Music Society of Adelaide’s competition in 1967.[ citation needed ] Strehlow earned a BA degree with Honours in History from the University of Adelaide in 1969.[ citation needed ] At university, he reviewed theatre and film for the student newspaper On Dit.[ citation needed ] In 1967, he helped run the student Film Society, which founded the film magazine Cinesa.[ citation needed ] It also hosted the first film of the Australian cinematic revival, Time in Summer,[ citation needed ]
In 1969, having written his college thesis on "Gandhi and Tradition in Gujarat",[ citation needed ] Strehlow spent four months in India, meeting with intellectuals, including Satyajit Ray, Sarbari Roy Chaudhuri, Subhas Mukherjee, and Ram Kinka in Calcutta, Amrit Rai in Allahabad.[ citation needed ] After further travel, he returned to Australia, where he spent two years teaching in state schools in South Australia.[ citation needed ] In early 1971, he studied the Aboriginal language Pitjantjatjara, part of the Western Deserts language group, at Adelaide University.[ citation needed ] The first work on this language was done by Strehlow's grandfather Rev. Carl Strehlow, from around 1900 to 1909. [5]
He moved to Alice Springs, in the Northern Territory, in 1972 and London, England, in 1978.[ citation needed ] In 1988–1989, he received a diploma in the History of the Fine and Decorative Arts from the Study Centre at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.[ citation needed ] Also in London, he attended lectures at the Institute for Cultural Research from 1983 until it went defunct.[ citation needed ]
Strehlow taught at Daws Road High School in 1970 and Elizabeth West High School in 1972, running drama workshops and student productions.[ citation needed ] At the same time, he pursued his interest in the Aboriginal people by establishing contact with people from the Flinders Ranges.[ citation needed ] In 1971, he toured eastern and northern Australia, making contact with urban aboriginal groups in New South Wales and Alice Springs.[ citation needed ] While in the Northern Territory from 1972 to 1975, he ran a clothing business in Alice Springs.[ citation needed ] He also spent some of that period living in close contact with fringe dwellers at the Mt. Nancy camp just outside Alice Springs.[ citation needed ]
In 1974, Strehlow taught drama in at Larrakeya Primary School, Jingili Primary School, Berrimah Primary School, and Casuarina High School in Darwin.[ citation needed ] He wrote four plays during this time: Alloway, for children; a treatment of Don Quixote suitable for adolescents; Maaruf the Cobbler of Cairo; and Aladdin, the latter two plays based on the stories in The Thousand and One Nights , some of which were performed.[ citation needed ]
At the end of 1974, Strehlow received a grant from the Australian Schools Commission to tour live theatre and run workshops in Northern Territory towns. [6] His direction of Aladdin drew from Polish director Jerzy Grotowski's ideas on a "poor theatre"—which placed the emphasis actor's body and its relation with the spectator, largely doing away with costumes, sets and music—that he saw in Polish productions through the Adelaide Festival of Arts.[ citation needed ] It was performed in places around the Northern Territory. Additionally, Strehlow toured a variety show, which included Punch and Judy as a shadow play with actors instead of puppets, at twelve Aboriginal settlements in the Northern Territory. The tour lasted for six months and ended with an open air production of Macbeth at Darwin High School.[ citation needed ]
In 1976, Strehlow travelled in New Guinea and Europe; he wrote Revolution’s Sons, a play about the anti-Vietnam War protest movement, while living in Paris.[ citation needed ] In 2022, he wrote the play Eliza! Eliza! The Doolittle Sequel, a variation of the Pygmalion story.[ citation needed ]
After returning to Adelaide, Strehlow established a theatre company in 1975 as an ensemble under the name Triad Stage Alliance. [7] After a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream , [8] the Triad toured Aladdin to South Australian schools.[ citation needed ] In 1978, Strehlow wrote two plays: Ali Baba (toured in South Australia); and The Slaying of the Dragon King, a play based on the Chinese political fable by Wang T’ieh, which was not performed.[ citation needed ] Strehlow staged Twelfth Night for the 1978 Adelaide Festival of Arts, followed by Revolution’s Sons later that year.[ citation needed ]The Elusive Reality, a poetry dramatization, was toured to secondary schools.[ citation needed ]
The Triad made its international debut at the 1978 Edinburgh Festival Fringe with its movement-based An Arabian Nights Spectacular, comprising Aladdin and Ali Baba.[ citation needed ] In his review of Aladdin and Ali Baba, Sandy Neilson of the Brunton Theatre wrote in The Scotsman that the company employed "some of the most controlled and imaginative ensemble work it has ever been my pleasure to witness. … Even one empty seat during this extraordinary piece of theatre constitutes a criminal waste." [9] Strehlow attributes the success of the productions in part due to the instruction that some Triad members received in mime from Zora Šemberová.[ citation needed ] The group also performed The Elusive Reality at the Festival.[ citation needed ]
The first Australian company to perform on the Edinburgh Fringe, the Triad won a Fringe First [10] Segments of the production were broadcast on ITV and BBC radio and television.[ citation needed ]Aladdin and Ali Baba were subsequently toured through Europe [11] [ better source needed ] and the United Kingdom,[ citation needed ] with a week at festivals in Wales, [12] Belgium and Germany.[ citation needed ] It also ran for two weeks at the Roundhouse Downstairs in London.[ citation needed ] In 1979–1980, each play was booked for a week by the Unicorn Children's Theatre based at London’s Arts Theatre.[ citation needed ]
In 1979, Strehlow wrote Seven Faces of Sindbad, a dramatisation of the Thousand and One Nights story, intended to appeal to both children and adults. Each of Sindbad’s seven voyages was given a different stylistic treatment. There was no scenery, other than low platforms, and no lighting effects or recorded sound. The actors were dressed only in tights, plus a top for the one actress. The only props were wooden sticks, and using these, with some basic chanting, the actors created the violent storms, shipwrecks, whales, man-eating pythons, and primate attacks of the original story.[ citation needed ]
With financial assistance from the South Australian Arts Development Unit, the Triad rehearsed Seven Faces of Sindbad in Perugia, Italy. The production premiered at the Edinburgh Festival, where it won Strehlow a second Fringe First.[ citation needed ] It relied heavily on classical mime and choreographed movement in addition to the dialogue. Sally Magnusson wrote in The Scotsman that "Seven Faces of Sindbad is a triumph of imaginative conception and execution – an enthralling spectacle for both adults and children." [13] The production toured for four years in the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, and Belgium. It received positive critical revies in Rotterdams Nieuwsblad (“crême de la crême”)[ citation needed ] and Soir Bruxelles (“two hours of pure magic”).[ citation needed ]Sindbad also toured around Britain, where The Guardian described it as "a magical show, played with energetic and assured expertise. . . Triad deserve a salute." [14] It was performed at London’s Arts Theatre for a week in 1981, and at Jacksons Lane in 1982.[ citation needed ] A review in the Rhein-Neckar Zeitung described the play as "completely magical and brilliant theatre. Power, quickness, abundance in language and storytelling, mime and absorbed exactitude, precision in dance and movement, the ability to transform themselves with a gesture, faultless brilliance in performance. Acting artistry of rare brightness. A touch of the high-wire; what the seven members of this group so rightly winning many international awards brought to fulfilment was theatre without speculation, without 'ifs and buts'." [15]
The production never recovered its costs.[ citation needed ] In 1983, after a week’s tour in the Netherlands, the play was given its last performance at the Watermill Theatre in Newbury, England, and the ensemble was then disbanded.[ citation needed ]
The ensemble was replaced by a traditional company that performed classics of English theatre.[ citation needed ] It produced a successful production of Macbeth first in Edinburgh in 1980, where Allen Wright, in The Scotsman, wrote: "the main interest lies in the interpretation of Macbeth himself. He is played by David Clisby as a darkly elegant and studious figure, more obsessed with witchcraft than passionately enamoured of his wife." [16] The Festival Times, Edinburgh commented, "This is an excellent production". [17] A review in the Times Educational Supplement said: "Strehlow's Triad has rare style. Its intelligent interpretation of Macbeth brought out new dimensions in Shakespeare's inexhaustible text". [18] The critic of the Darmstädter Echo wrote that "Macbeth ... auf die Füße gestellt." [19] Similarly, the review in Rhein-Neckar Zeitung stated: "Ausdruckskraft kam aus der Vitalität der Darsteller, sowie aus der sprachlichen Präzision, mit der die Blankverse an die Zuhörer kamen." [20]
Macbeth was revived in 1982 and toured the United Kingdom and continental Europe for six months.[ citation needed ]
In 1981, Strehlow premiered The Slaying of the Dragon King at the Edinburgh Festival. With colourful costumes, Chinese gong. stylised ensemble movement and dialogue, it told the story of how the Chinese Communist Revolution came to a remote village controlled by corrupt Confucian headman Zodiac Mah and his assistant Inky Nob. When the crops failed due to drought, Zodiac urged the villagers to pray for rain instead of irrigating.[ citation needed ] In its review, The Scotsman wrote: "With much bashing of gongs and a minimum of props, Triad present a delightful parable of life in a post-revolutionary Chinese village, the backwater of Mah's Bend." [21] A reviewer in The Glasgow Herald wrote:
The tale itself is so strong because it is so basic—old traditions versus new ideology. ... The production reverberates with movement and colour. Tai chi-style gestures are cleverly choreographed into dances (performed with swagger and precision), gongs tinkle and boom dramatically while the cast switch, at the drop of a coolie hat, from one role to another. Damyn Lodge’s whipper-snapper selling peanuts, her garrulous old peasant and her snivelling young wife are full of pithy character, while David Clisby’s scheming, greedy mandarin is every inch the wily oriental gentleman. [22]
The production won Strehlow a third Fringe First.[ citation needed ] It toured to a handful of venues in the United Kingdom and played in Rotterdam (Theater Zuidplein), Amsterdam (de Meervaart), Haarlem (Stadsschouwburg), Arnhem (Schouwburg), Utrecht (de Blauwe Zaal), Groningen (Schouwburg), Heidelberg (Städtische Bühnen), Stuttgart (Städtische Bühnen), and Florence (Teatro Tenda).[ citation needed ]
After The Slaying of the Dragon King Strehlow stopped writing for the stage, based the company in London, and for the next three decades it toured Shakespeare's plays and modern British classics widely in Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy and Switzerland.[ citation needed ] Productions included Macbeth,[ citation needed ] Hamlet , [23] Twelfth Night , [24] Romeo and Juliet [25] The Tempest , [26] A Midsummer Night’s Dream, [27] As You Like It ,[ citation needed ] Much Ado About Nothing , [28] Antony and Cleopatra , [29] The Taming of the Shrew [30] and The Merchant of Venice , [31] as well as The Importance of Being Earnest , [32] An Inspector Calls , [33] Blithe Spirit and Private Lives , [34] Look Back in Anger , [35] The Glass Menagerie , [36] Black Comedy and Equus , [37] Pygmalion, [38] Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead , [39] The Real Inspector Hound . [40] Relatively Speaking , [41] Time and Time Again by Ayckbourn, The Caretaker, [42] I Ought to Be in Pictures , [43] and Sherlock Holmes: The Adventure at Sir Arthur Sullivan's by Tim Heath.[ citation needed ]
Strehlow has also worked as a freelance director in Australia (Tony Strachan's Harlequin Shuffle for the Stage Company in Adelaide in 1985) and Germany (Michael Cadman's I thought I heard a Cuckoo for White Horse Theatre in 1987).[ citation needed ] In 2007, Strehlow staged an experimental German production of The Merchant of Venice (Der Kaufmann von Venedig) in the E.T.A.-Hoffmann-Theater in Bamberg, using a half-English, half-Germany cast. [44]
In the late 1960s and early 1970s Strehlow made contact with Aboriginal people at Quorn, Hawker and Copley in South Australia, as well as urban Aboriginal people in Sydney, Brisbane and elsewhere.[ citation needed ] Since 1875, he has maintained contact with traditional Aboriginal people.[ citation needed ] [45] These include mainstream politicians, activists, academics, mission workers, Land Rights lawyers, artists, authors, descendants of the original community formed by Carl and Frieda Strehlow at Ntaria, and persons generally interested in the evolution of black-white relationships in Australia.[ citation needed ]
Strehlow's father, professor TGH Strehlow, recorded secret-sacred ceremonies of Aboriginal people in Central Australia for over thirty years.[ citation needed ] In 1897, his grandfather, Rev. Carl Strehlow, collaborated with fellow missionary JG Reuther at Bethesda Mission in South Australia on the first complete translation of the New Testament into Diyari.[ citation needed ] While staying at the Hermannsburg Mission from 1894 to 1922, his grandfather produced vocabularies and grammars of the Aranda and Loritja languages as well as the anthropological tract Die Aranda– und Loritja-Stämme in Zentral-Australien (English: The Aranda and Loritja Tribes of Central Australia), which laid the foundation for his son TGH Strehlow's work.[ citation needed ] Carl and his wife Freida Keysser also helped to end the extermination of Central Australia's aboriginal population, which followed closely behind white settlement and the establishment of cattle stations that monopolized the scarce water supplies in the Outback.[ citation needed ]
Strehlow's interest in writing about his grandparents was spurred by learning of the existence of his grandmother Frieda's diaries in Berlin, chronicling her life on the Australian frontier during the late 1890s and early 20th century. He began to question accepted views he found in academic writings.[ citation needed ] Starting in 1994, he began work on a biography of his grandparents, conducting research in the United Kingdom, United States, Czech Republic, Germany, Poland and Australia.[ citation needed ] Strehlow was initially assisted financially by the Institute for Community Studies through the sociologist Michael Young.[ citation needed ] The biography was completed in 2019.[ citation needed ]
In July and November 1995, articles by Strehlow about the biography were published in the The Adelaide Review .[ citation needed ] He wrote the entry for Harry Hillier in The Australian Dictionary of Biography (Supplement) and for the Strehlows in Josie Petrick's The History of Alice Springs Through Landmarks and Street Names.[ citation needed ] In 2000, he appeared in Hart Cohen's documentary Mr. Strehlow's Films for SBS Television.[ citation needed ] His paper "Re-appraising Carl Strehlow through the Spencer-Strehlow Debate" was published by the Strehlow Research Centre in Occasional Paper 3 in 2004.[ citation needed ]
Although much had been written about Carl, almost nothing had been written about Frieda. At least sixty percent of the relevant sources about his grandparents were handwritten in German, and they had been ignored by previous writers.[ citation needed ] Information about Carl had been sourced largely to his rival Walter Baldwin Spencer of Melbourne University, who, according to Strehlow, sought to discredit Carl’s work.[ citation needed ]
Volume I of The Tale of Frieda Keysser, published in 2011, covers Frieda and Carl’s early life, training and background, JG Reuther and Carl's work on the translation of the New Testament into Dieri, and the first years at the Hermannsburg Mission, during which Carl began researching the languages, beliefs and customs of the Western Aranda and the Loritja. Baron Moritz von Leonhardi became Carl’s sponsor for the publication of his Die Aranda– und Loritja-Stämme in Zentral-Australien by the Frankfurt Völkermuseum.[ citation needed ] Carl questioned aspects of Spencer and Gillen's work The Native Tribes of Central Australia, fuelling a debate in London which ran for a number of years. [46] Meanwhile, Freida was researching the infant mortality and social breakdown resulting from the Aranda's switch from living as hunter-gatherers to a settled way of life.[ citation needed ] Her conclusions disagreed with Spencer and Gillen's conclusions that Australia’s aboriginal population was "doomed." [47] Volume I ends with the family returning to Germany in 1910 without any firm intention of returning to Australia.[ citation needed ]
Marcia Langton of Monash University launched Volume I in Alice Springs on December 1, 2011. [48] Alison Anderson, Member for Macdonnell in the Northern Territory Legislative Assembly, announced its publication in the territory's Parliament House on 30 November 2011. She remarked:
I hope it corrects some of the misunderstanding and misinformation that has been spread over the years about the relationship between the missionaries and the Aranda people. I am the product of grandparents who lived with the missionaries. ... The missionaries left us with our culture, songs and history intact. ... For the [Aranda], there is never a bad word said about the missionaries. ... This book calls into question many things that have been written earlier about Hermannsburg. ... I hope and pray that this book helps correct the negative portrayals of the Lutheran missionaries put forward over the years."[ citation needed ]
Lyall Kupke, archivist at the Lutheran Archives in Adelaide, wrote approving of the book in 2012:[ citation needed ] Reviewing Volume I in The Weekend Australian , Nicolas Rothwell described it as "an indispensable contribution to the literature of remote, indigenous Australia. ... Strehlow's Tale is ... at its heart, a story of exile, displacement and return ... its hard, serried paragraphs sheltering abrupt passages of romantic lyric force. ... This book is a written incarnation of country, the desert in the mind." [3] In The Monthly , Peter Sutton wrote: "For all its gritty attention to detail, the book has a heroic largeness of spirit, a kind of opulence of time and space and credible personalities that is so often missing from what is written by scholars of the past and from the bush. It is like the Red Centre itself." [49] Lois Zweck wrote in Lutheran Women that the book offers insights into "the often underrated work of the first Hermannsburg missionaries. ... But above all, by highlighting Frieda’s perspective and portraying the everyday occurrences of life at Hermannsburg [it] offers a new understanding of the difficulties, tensions and disappointments, but also the patient and painstaking achievements of the men and women on the missions." [50] Maurice Schild in The Lutheran Theological Journal, called the book:
"a superb achievement, and an important cultural event. ... It comes as an antidote to much popular as well as academic derogatory parlance on missions and the mark they've left. At the same time it offers balm for the still hurting and abused image of Australia's Aboriginal people – and it does them honour. It also honours ordinary faithful people of the time: 'this handful of Lutheran families' who undertook 'what the State of South Australia could or would not, the care and nurture of those tribes broken by white settlement.'" [51]
Volume II, published in 2019, covers Carl and Frieda's time in Germany in late 1910 and 1911, as Carl gave a lecture tour of German mission societies in Lower Franconia, including at the Frankfurt Museum for the local Anthropological Society. Leonhardi’s sudden death in October 1910 left Carl’s book without an editor. Its linguistic research was cut by Bernhard Hagen and F.C.A. Sarg of the Frankfurt Museum, who took over publication. The work continued to be published in sections, under a variety of editors, over the decade. At the end of 1911, the Carl, Frieda and their youngest son, Theo, returned to Australia, when the chairman of the Mission Board, Rev. Kaibel, asked to return to restore good governance to the Mission Board.[ citation needed ]
Meanwhile, according to Strehlow, after Carl’s criticisms of his and Gillen’s work, Baldwin Spencer arranged for damning reports on Hermannsburg to appear in the southern Australia press, so that the Commonwealth Government would resume the Mission. He wanted to set up an orphanage for half-caste children in its place as part of the program known today as "The Stolen Generation".[ citation needed ] Alarmed by what was happening, the Aranda population wrote letters to Carl, asking him and Frieda to come back. Frieda was overwhelmed with guilt about leaving their five older children in Germany.[ citation needed ] During World War I, Spencer was able to further his plans for Hermannsburg, but officials in Australian government circles, such as John A. Gilruth in Darwin, backed by Police Sergeant Robert Stott in Alice Springs, opposed this, and Hermannsburg survived. [52]
Frieda’s work with mothers and children meant that the population of Aranda people grew.[ citation needed ] As the war progressed, Carl communicated directly with government ministers and, sensing that the Lutherans were losing the will to carry on their missions, asked Bishop Gilbert White if the Anglicans were willing to take over if Hermannsburg was abandoned. No successor for Carl could be found after the war ended, so he delayed his planned return to Germany until 1923.[ citation needed ] His health began to fail. Having secured Hermannsburg’s future with Administrator Urquhart, he travelled south on October 10, 1922, to see a doctor. He died on that journey at Horseshoe Bend Station on 20 October, leaving Frieda to carry on south with young Theo on her own.[ citation needed ]
Volume II was launched by Ted Evans at The Residency, Alice Springs, on 17 December 2019. [2] In his speech, Evans said John Strehlow had: "We now have first-hand reminiscences of the pioneering days at Hermannsburg through the eyes of a totally Christian woman, a point of view previously unknown."[ citation needed ] The complete work reviewed by Hartwig F. Harms in the Zeitschrift für Bayerische Kirchengeschichte in 2021, calling the book "an exciting tapestry of family, mission and historical details with illuminating excursions into the cultural anthropology of the era – provocative, enriching, it makes you think. For mission scientists, anthropologists and all for whom Aborigines and the question about the 'right' stance towards them is close to the heart, of the greatest interest." [53]